What Sets You On Fire?
How to Find Your Purpose Through Pain

This post is a continuation of yesterday — where I told you about the six-word quote that changed everything for me, and how Elizabeth's Farm Table was born from loneliness and loss in a small town in Wyoming.

But today I want to go deeper. Because finding your table is one thing. Knowing what to put on it is another.

Today I want to talk about the thing that sets you on fire.

And I want to start by telling you something that might surprise you.

I Always Knew.

Not what form it would take. Not the business, the courses, the community, the cards.

But the fire? The drive? The deep, unshakeable desire to make a difference?

That has been in me since my twenties.

I grew up in Iowa — and as much as I love my roots, I knew from a young age that I wanted something different. Something bigger. Something that required me to be brave.

So I left.

I traveled. I saw the world. I did things on my own that most people wait for someone else to do with them. I have never been afraid to go alone — to show up, to explore, to chase something I couldn't quite name yet.

There has always been a fight in me. A desire to make a difference. A quiet, persistent voice that said — there is something you are here to do.

I just didn't know yet exactly what it was.

The Passion That Started It All

Even before loss found me — before the gravesides and the silences and the long seasons of grief — I had a passion for health and wellness.

For real, whole food. For living holistically. For the connection between what we put in our bodies and how we show up in our lives.

This wasn't something I stumbled into. It was something I felt called toward — a knowing, deep in my bones, that the way we nourish ourselves matters. That food is medicine. That the earth grows what we need if we pay attention.

My husband and I dreamed of land long before we had it. We wanted to grow food, live close to the earth, build something real with our hands. That dream — of a homestead, an orchard, a greenhouse, a table covered in food we grew ourselves — was always part of who I was becoming.

And then loss arrived.

Twenty-three years ago I lost my father in a boat accident off the coast of Oregon. And everything got deeper.

What Pain Did to My Purpose

Grief has a way of stripping everything down to what actually matters.

When you have stood at enough gravesides — when you have watched enough people you love leave this world — you stop wasting time on things that don't matter. You start asking harder questions. You start listening more carefully to the quiet voice inside you that has always known what you were meant to do.

The losses I walked through didn't create my passion. They refined it.

They took what was already in me — the fight, the drive, the love of health and wholeness and community — and they made it urgent. They made it personal. They made it impossible to ignore.

Because here is what I discovered in the middle of all that grief and loneliness:

And I found that to be true.

I was dying inside. Not pursuing my dreams. Not living the life I was built for. Going through the motions, surviving the days, wondering if this was all there was.

And I realized — the grief was not just about the people I had lost.

It was about the version of myself I was losing too.

You Have Something In You

I want to say this as clearly as I possibly can —

You have a fire in you. It may be buried under the grief right now. It may be quiet, dim, almost invisible. But it is there. I promise you it is there.

And here is what I know — we are miserable until we find it. Truly miserable. We can fill our days with activity and noise and distraction, but until we are living in alignment with what we were made for, something will always feel off. Something will always feel missing.

The grief from loss created an even deeper passion in me. The loneliness — and it IS unbearable sometimes, let me not pretend otherwise — pushed me toward something. It pushed me toward purpose.

Because the alternative was perishing.

And I chose not to perish.

We Survived Loss. We Can Do Anything.

I want you to hear this today.

You survived the unsurvivable. You walked through the kind of loss that takes your breath away and leaves you wondering who you are and what your life is for.

And you are still here.

Still Here. Still Me.

The woman you are becoming through this grief is not less than who you were before. She is more. She is deeper, wiser, more compassionate, more real. She has been through something that has given her a capacity for understanding that most people never develop.

And that capacity — that hard-won, grief-tested, love-forged capacity — is part of your purpose.

Keep going. Keep pushing. Keep living.

We survived loss. We can do anything.

What To Do Next

If you are reading this and thinking — I have no idea what sets me on fire. I can't see past today.

I hear you. I have been there.

Here is what I want you to do: